White “Girls”

Last night, HBO aired the second episode of “Girls.” Titled “Vagina Panic,” it featured a plotline about unintended pregnancy and abortion that was remarkable for how, well, unremarkable and straightforward it was. (“What was she going to do? Have a baby and take it to her babysitting job? That’s not realistic,” said Lena Dunham’s heroine and alter ego, Hannah.) It also incorporated, for the first time, a person of color who was not a caricature.

The presence of a brown-skinned Indian-American ob-gyn who gives Hannah both a pelvic exam and a talking-to about the realities of H.I.V. infection is notable for how it contrasts with the recent, vigorous, and at times pained debate over the show’s lack of racial diversity. Dunham’s “whitewashing” of her native New York, as The Daily Beast’s Rebecca Carroll called it, was hinted at in laudatory essays and profiles in the days and weeks before the show’s April 15th première, but was given widespread attention with the April 16th publication of a critical essay titled “Where (My) Girls At?,” on the women’s Web site The Hairpin.

The essay’s biracial author, Jenna Wortham, praised Dunham’s success and her willingness to tweak her characters’ own economic privilege—in the première episode’s first scene, Hannah is blindsided by the announcement that her parents will no longer financially support her; she later steals money meant for the maid from their hotel room—while at the same time taking Dunham to task for ignoring how that privilege intersects with race. “The argument has been made that smart women on screen are already enough of a minority to make up for the lack of women of color,” wrote Wortham, who works as a technology reporter at the New York Times. “Nope. Not good enough.”

Wortham’s essay, along with other, similar arguments on the blogs Racialicious and Colorlines, provoked a number of responses, equal parts positive and negative. Pop-culture writer and editor Mark Harris, a veteran of Entertainment Weekly and New York magazine, took to Twitter to acknowledge that the scarcity of people of color on American television is a “huge issue,” but defended Dunham’s vision: “let’s not pretend that 20something NYCers never self-segregate,” he wrote. Later that night, Lesley Arfin, a thirty-something staff writer for “Girls,” weighed in with a statement—also via Twitter—that was breathtakingly dismissive and intellectually dishonest: “What really bothered me most about [the movie] Precious was that there was no representation of ME.”

What Arfin and other naysayers didn’t seem to get about “Where (My) Girls At?” was that, embedded within Wortham’s frustrations about the whiteness of the four main leads was the more damning complaint that the people of color who do appear in “Girls” are thinly drawn caricatures. In the pilot, we meet Joy Lin, a bespectacled, goody-goody Asian-American girl who is chosen over Hannah for a job at the publishing house where they are both intern because she has better computer-design skills. There’s also a black “homeless guy” who entreats Hannah to smile as she makes her way from her parents’ midtown hotel back to her Brooklyn apartment. These characters are written as either amusements or impediments who stand in the way of…what? An uninterrupted walk down the sidewalk? A job?

But why so much agonizing over “Girls,” and how it positions itself on questions of race? “Girls” is certainly not the only TV show set in New York to feature an all-white cast with few or no people of color. “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “Sex and the City,” and the current CBS hit “How I Met Your Mother”—not to mention most of the œuvre of Woody Allen—all give us a New York that appears strangely homogenous and insular. But that was then and this is 2012, and many of the arguments over how “Girls” approaches race are rooted in the expectations and anxieties of this particular moment. There is a disconnect between the rapidly changing demographics of the country (including the Oval Office) and the stories we see reflected back to us on the small and silver screens.

It’s all the more surprising because Dunham, a self-described feminist, seems unaware that the progressive gender politics she embraces have a long and frustrating history of relegating race to the sidelines. But I don’t fault her entirely, if only because she seems genuinely open to such criticism and admits that she’s still learning. In many ways, as Richard Brody wrote recently over on The Front Row, “Girls” is a performance of one self-absorbed young person’s initiation into maturity and adulthood. (Dunham last July: “I wish there was a way to have read a bunch of feminist theory without having to read any feminist theory.”)

In an interview with the Huffington Post earlier this month she acknowledged the shortcomings of the show and promised to address the issue in the series’ second season. “The world’s getting more and more full,” she said. “Our generation is not just white girls. It’s guys. Women of color. Gay people. The idea that I could speak for everyone is so absurd. But what is nice is if I could speak for me and it’s resonant for people, then that’s about as much as I could hope for.” In a live chat hosted by HBO last Monday, she called the all-white casting “a complete accident.”

Maybe so. After all, Lena Dunham’s world—her Tribeca neighborhood; her Brooklyn Heights school, St. Ann’s; and her Midwestern liberal-arts college, Oberlin—are populated mostly by privileged white people. As the week of discussions wore on, I came to the wearying but clarifying conclusion, as others did, that perhaps our ire should be directed at the cultural gatekeepers, the studio executives who seem to have decided that stories about white people sell better. (As The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates put it on Friday, “It is not so wrong to craft an exclusively white world—certainly a significant portion of America lives in one. What is wrong is for power-brokers to pretend that no other worlds exist.”) In the end, I think that what Dunham owes her audience, first and foremost, is not the fully accurate representation of others’ experiences but the commitment to avoid offering up crass stereotypes of anyone who doesn’t look like her.

Paging Lesley Arfin. Last Wednesday evening, Arfin, under increasing fire from all corners of the internet, deleted her “Precious” tweet and issued an apology of sorts—“Without thinking, I put gender politics above race and class. That was careless.”—but then deleted that, too. (As of this writing, neither she, Dunham, nor HBO have made any further comment.) But the damage was done: Internet sleuths were mining Arfin’s writings for evidence of other racially problematic commentary, and they found it, including a comparison of Barack Obama’s skin color to excrement and an interview in which she expressed her love for the word “nigger.”

Arfin’s glibness about this country’s racial realities suggested a disinterest in history and absence of empathy. It did not seem like much of a stretch to say that one could draw a direct connection between the post-modern hipster “irony” of someone who thinks that racial insults are amusing and the show’s (perhaps inadvertent) erasure of a large swath of the city’s inhabitants. Or that Dunham should be more thoughtful about who she chooses to surround herself with as she formulates the rest of the show. As cultural commentator Jay Smooth advised her on April 18th, “You need to come get your people.”

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On April 4th, an assortment of New York’s power players descended upon Chelsea’s School of Visual Arts Theatre on Twenty-third Street for a showing of the first three episodes of “Girls”; candy and popcorn were on hand, and, before the screenings began, Dunham, along with HBO President Sue Naegle and executive producers Jenni Konner and Judd Apatow, took to the stage to thank the assembled audience. Afterwards, guests were ferried via bus to an after-party at Le Bain, a multi-level bar and night club located on the top floor of the nearby Standard Hotel, where Edward Norton, Claire Danes, and fashion designer Zac Posen sipped champagne, nibbled on crudités, and struggled to squeeze past one another in the tightly packed space. The lights of lower Manhattan—Lena’s childhood stomping grounds—glittered before them.

Tony Danza was there, as were Steve Buscemi, Richard Dreyfus, Chloe Sevigny, Kyra Sedgwick, Kevin Bacon, and John Cameron Mitchell. At one point, I got into a brief but heated discussion with a television critic about the problematic racial representations on the show. (He wasn’t having any of it, despite my protestations and those of his wife.) I drank a little too much champagne and, emboldened by the bubbly, leaned over a railing to gawk at the celebrities in the V.I.P. area, namely Brian Williams, of “NBC Nightly News,&#8221 who sat with his daughter, “Girls” actress Allison Williams, at a table filled with charcuterie. To my left, twenty-nine-year-old Gabby Sidibe, the star of “Precious,” carefully made her way down the steps into the V.I.P. area, wandered around a bit, then returned to the main floor, headed in the direction of the elevators. She seemed to be looking for something, or someone. Or perhaps I was just projecting.